Smithville Rosenwald School
(ca. 1922)
The Smithville Rosenwald School building, part of a grassroots anti-segregation effort, has served the local community as a school and community center since 1922.
19412 South Hill St., Cornelius, NC 28031
The Smithville Rosenwald School represents a unique early-twentieth-century grassroots effort to resist Jim Crow segregation while simultaneously improving the lives of the youngest victims of that discriminatory system. Between the mid-1910s and the early 1930s, the Rosenwald Fund operated as an initiative jointly created by Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington and Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald to help rural southern communities through the improvement of African American education. In an era of segregated education, the Fund worked with local communities to fund jointly the construction or improvement of nearly 5,400 schools for Black children across fifteen southern states, including 813 schools in North Carolina (the most in the nation) and twenty-six schools in Mecklenburg County.
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The Mecklenburg County Board of Education purchased the land for the Smithville Rosenwald School from brothers James H. and Clifford E. Smith for $500. The schoolhouse was completed in 1922 at a cost of $4,000. Consistent with the joint community effort central to the Rosenwald Fund’s mission, the Black community in Smithville raised $500 for the new school. The Rosenwald Fund provided $900. Donations from the local White community covered the remaining cost. Of the approximately 160 elementary school aged Black children in the area, the Smithville Rosenwald School enrolled 135 students and its first teachers – Ms. Zetta Sherrill and Ms. Geraldine McCullough – saw an average daily student attendance of 102. Most of those students walked to school to attend its seasonally split sessions, so scheduled to allow the children to help their families in the fields during planting and harvest times.
The one-story three-room schoolhouse lacked both indoor plumbing and electricity, services largely unavailable in the rural portions of Mecklenburg County at the time. Accordingly, like other Rosenwald schools, the Smithville school featured large windows to maximize natural light during the school day and an outdoor privy. During winter, the building was heated by a wood stove. When the Smithville Rosenwald School closed in the late 1940s, local students began attending Davidson Elementary School, now the Ada Jenkins Center, before continuing to Torrence Lytle High School.
In 1954, the county Board of Education auctioned the building to five local men for approximately $2,500. Those five men – Wilson Potts, Ernest Harvell, Ozon Brice, Mack Brice, and James Caldwell – oversaw the conversion of the building into the newly-founded Smithville Better Community Club. The Club began a central hub for civic activities for the Smithville community, including Saturday night dances, community fundraising, a barber shop, vaccination clinics, and as a stop for the mobile library and a science lab. The building continues to be used as a multipurpose facility for the local community.